I am resuming my Salestech Consolidator Series: in this 4th installment, we delve into the conversation intelligence space with Gong.
It all began when its founder, Amit Bendov, faced a decline in revenue at his previous company, SiSense. He realized that the root cause was tied to the stakeholders his sales reps could engage with. So, he tried to record and analyze all sales calls but found the then-available solutions from contact center software providers ill-suited and too complex to implement.
Gong was created in August 2015 and quickly introduced its first solution. The ability to transcribe all calls and analyze long, unscripted B2B sales conversations came at the perfect time as inside sales were taking off. Before, sales leaders would get their market pulse by attending sales meetings. As sales transitioned to the phone and online, conversation intelligence became the new way to gather insights about what was going on.
For several years, the conversation intelligence market was a 2-horse race between Chorus and Gong. The companies adopted very different approaches to the market. While Chorus emphasized engineering leadership, Gong focused on providing and sharing insights.
Gong also prioritized brand building. Under the leadership of its CMO, Udi Ledergor, it (re)wrote the LinkedIn playbook, gaining unfair mindshare in the sales ecosystem. It now boasts 200,000 LinkedIn followers, and a staggering 83% of its 1.2M monthly website visitors come directly to it.
In 2019, Gong's 3x growth allowed it to separate from its competitors. The company was on its way to cross the $20M revenue mark. But with the number 2 in the market Chorus under $5M, it raised questions about the overall conversation intelligence market size. Could it be large enough to fuel its growth ambitions?
In the Fall of 2019, Gong repositioned itself into a newly minted category —revenue intelligence—. It had already acquired ONDiGO in 2018 to add sales activity — emails, meetings, and phone calls — capture to its software. Revenue Intelligence aims at logging all sales interactions and uses data to fuel coaching, sales guidance, deal intelligence, and forecasting.
The COVID-19 pandemic further boosted Gong's growth. Today, I estimate its revenues to be $250M.
The company is taking things to the next level with its recently unveiled Assist product. It harnesses insights to provide sellers with recommendations including crafting personalized emails and is expanding the company's footprint into the sales engagement/execution space.
Gong has become one of the industry's thought leaders, with a continued emphasis on how data AI can help at all stages of the revenue cycle
.